Mark Zuckerberg: evaluation

Transcript context

…Did you know it would be AI? We thought it was going to be something that had to do with training large models. At the time I thought it was probably going to be something that had to do with content. It’s just the pattern matching of running the company, there's always another thing. At that time I was so deep into trying to get the recommendations working for Reels and other content. That’s just such a big unlock for Instagram and Facebook now, being able to show people content that's interesting to them from people that they're not even following. But that ended up being a very good decision in retrospect. And it came from being behind. It wasn't like “oh, I was so far ahead. ” Actually, most of the times where we make some decision that ends up seeming good is because we messed something up before and just didn't want to repeat the mistake. This is a total detour, but I want to ask about this while we're on this. We'll get back to AI in a second. In 2006 you didn't sell for $1 billion but presumably there's some amount you would have sold for, right? Did you write down in your head like “I think the actual valuation of Facebook at the time is this and they're not actually getting the valuation right”? If they’d offered you $5 trillion, of course you would have sold. So how did you think about that choice?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.